by Donna Leon
The men all seemed to wear some sort of tonic or spray on their hair, for, no matter how windy the night, their hair was never disturbed by any passing breeze. Most of them wore overcoats or, for a few years, while they were in fashion, sheepskin jackets. Under them, they invariably wore a sports jacket or a suit and tie. Most of them wore rings, usually on the smallest finger of the hand, and most of those had inordinately large stones. The women showed wider variety within the species, probably because they could select among the options provided by different hair length or the choice of slacks or skirt, though almost all of them opted for the second. They all seemed younger than the men they accompanied and tended to wear furs and, while these were in fashion, la pelliccia ecologica (artificial fur) in wild patterns and colors. Their shoes always had high heels and their fingernails showed signs of a great deal of attention and work, as did their makeup.
For a year or so I amused myself by placing silent bets with myself about who would get off at San Marcuola, but my winning became so annoyingly constant that I abandoned the game, ceased to study them, and returned my attention to the lighted windows of the palazzi we passed as we sailed up the Grand Canal.
My interest was renewed because of Zanzibar. In 1992, the police, after more than a month of infiltration and surveillance, put into effect Operation Zanzibar, which took the form of a lightning blitz on the Casinò del Lido, where seven croupiers were arrested, all of whom were charged with stealing from the Casinò. And this month, after more than five years—nur ein Katzensprung, by the standards of Italian justice—the case of the last of them will be decided in the court of appeals. Sensing possible fodder for a book, I decided to renew my interest in the Casinò.
At first my interest was that of a researcher, interested in fact, mere fact, the sort of tourist-book information that very often proves intriguing. The Casinò in Ca’ Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal, in which palace Richard Wagner died in 1883, was opened in 1945 and currently employs almost four hundred people, most of them Venetian and 280 of them working as croupiers. In an average year, it takes in 160 billion lire (80 million euros), of which half goes directly to the Comune di Venezia, where it replaces some of the money that government cutbacks have removed from the city. More than half a million people gamble at the Casinò each year, 630,000 by their records—most of them Italian and most of those from the Veneto. Because my calculator has only eight decimal places, I’m not at all sure what to do with all the zeroes, but if I divide 160 by 630, I get .253, but I’ve no idea if this means the average person loses 253 lire or 253,000 lire. No matter where the decimal point gets put, there’s no mistaking the fact that the Casinò wins.
Not that this is a truth that seems to have penetrated the minds of the people who go there, each of whom must be attracted, at some level, by the belief that he or she is the chosen one, the one selected to win and win big. This was apparent the evening I finally went to the Casinò to get a feel for the place and, in the process, a closer look at all those people I’d watched for years getting off the Number One. Before they enter the palazzo, they must pay an entrance fee of 18,000 lire (10 euros), but as this allows them to enter one of the most beautiful palazzi in the city it’s money well spent.
The first thing that strikes anyone arriving at the palazzo are the figures of the chain-smoking taxi drivers who huddle inside the glass doors of the water entrance, waiting to take a fare back to the station or to Piazzale Roma or perhaps home somewhere in the city. Beyond them is an enormous, high-ceilinged space that conjures up visions of masked singers, perhaps the sound of a band of Vivaldi’s orphan girls singing a cantata specially written for some festive day. Instead, the first thing one hears is the clang, clang, clang of coins cascading into the bottom trays of the scores of slot machines that line the walls of a long string of rooms off to the left. Sometimes the hushed voices of the players are blocked out by a repeated bell announcing a new victory over the goddess Fortuna.
At the end of this entrance hall is a long counter, behind which sit soberly clad attendants who check the passports or identity cards of those who enter and punch their details into computers: nationality, age, birthplace. After that, the visitor is free to ascend to the upper halls, where the classy games are played: chemin de fer, roulette, blackjack.
The overwhelming sense given by these rooms—glorious, tall spaces decorated with the excess and beauty of centuries—is one of a faith that has realized and accepted its own futility. Men—and the players here are almost entirely men—sit or stand around the tables, intent upon the play, the spinning wheel, the turn of a card. Because gambling has never interested me in the least, it makes as little sense to me as does bodybuilding or the repetition of the rosary. All three activities seem to have in common that they manage to fill up hours of time while providing the hope that some sort of salvation will result from the exercise. Bodybuilders at least get to see a physical change, and old women who tell their beads can at least do so without losing the weekly grocery money. It is difficult to see what positive benefits accrue from gambling but, as I said, it’s something that has never interested me and so I am incapable of understanding its attractions.
Just as in the James Bond movies, the tables here are covered with green felt, the croupiers dressed in black tie. In a country of remarkably handsome men, most of the croupiers stand out, perhaps because of the severe elegance of their uniforms or because of the equally severe elegance of their demeanor. In sharp contrast, most of the players have a vaguely raffish air, as if they’d gone too long without sleep or had for weeks been eating sporadically and badly.
John Donne writes, “She is all states and all princes, I. Nothing else is.” Though Donne is talking about love, the same certainty that nothing else is hangs like a transparent cloud above these tables, for nothing captures the interest of these players save the spin of the wheel or the card about to be revealed. At one of the roulette tables, I watched as a newly arrived player pointed to a stack of green chips lying abandoned on the green felt. “Oh, they’re mine,” said a young man in a badly fitting gray suit who stood across the table from him. Silently, the newcomer passed the chips across the table to the other man, who neither bothered to thank him nor seemed at all concerned that, in the single-mindedness of his playing, he’d walked away from and entirely forgotten about three or four hundred euros in chips.
People who work in the Casinò have told me that those who come here, at least those who go to the upstairs rooms, don’t really care about winning, that it is only the playing that interests them. In the case of the young man at the roulette table I would infer that, since the idea of losing money didn’t engage him in the least, neither would that of winning it.
That, in fact, is the overwhelming impression left by an evening in the Casinò: the utter lack of anything approaching joy—even enthusiasm—on the part of the men who gamble there. Never did I see any expression of emotion, not when the croupier’s rake pulled away a month’s salary, nor when it pushed toward a winner the equivalent of the down payment on an apartment. Their faces, rendered blank by something beyond boredom, reminded me of the people who stand in the foyers of the banks on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich and watch the prices of stocks worldwide slide up and down, pushing fortunes back and forth with the same impersonality with which the croupiers slide the chips across the green felt tables.
As the balls clicked into their destined places within the wheel, my eyes rose up to the frescoed ceiling and then to the walls of the lovely sala di giochi in which stood these dark-clothed men. Above me, to my left, the portrait of a bewigged nobleman looked down on us in thin-lipped disapproval. Defenseless in the face of his unspoken accusation, I left the room and went downstairs to have a look at the slot machines.
Introduced in 1991, the slot machines now account for about 30 percent of the earnings of the Casinò, and even a short time spent walking among them will explain why. For her
e are the people of Venice, dressed as casually as though they’d just slipped down to the corner bar to have a coffee, not the wealthy riskers who come from Milan or Modena and can easily toss away 50,000 euros in an evening. Instead, down here on the ground floor one sees the same women who argue about the price of fish at the Rialto market, the same old women who complain about how difficult it is to make do on a state pension of 700 euros a month. And, not at all surprisingly, most of them are women, and most of them will not see forty again.
Here, instead of having to learn the rules of play, instead of having to calculate the odds or, like many of the men at the roulette tables, keep closely guarded notebooks filled with numbers and abstruse calculations, all one has to do is buy 5-euro chips at a dispenser, slide them one by one into the brightly lit machine, and pull the handle. The computerized machines are set to pay back 93 percent to the players. Sounds good. But it also means that the average client who plays there is statistically guaranteed to lose 7 percent of what they play, no matter how long they play, no matter how much or how little they play.
Though there is no joy to be observed here, there is at least a bit of human contact, for often these women come in pairs and, as their arms rise up and pull and pull and pull, they chat with their friends about, I suppose, the price of fish at Rialto. It is too painful to contemplate the possibility that they are also discussing the difficulty of making do on a pension of 700 euros a month.
Gypsies
You’ve seen them. In Venice, they work (if that’s the proper verb) on the bridges: one man to work and two to keep watch for the police. The watchmen help set up the portable table; sometimes one of them pretends to play the game and, of course, wins, thus encouraging other people that they too can beat the odds. While the watchmen keep an eye out for the sudden arrival of the police, the principal player sets the three walnut shells on the table, then a stone or sometimes a bean, and then he begins to call out to passersby that this is their chance to win, win, win. Keep your eye on the shell with the bean under it and win double your money.
When a sucker arrives, the man running the game puts the bean under one of the shells, admonishes the player to keep his eye on the shell it is under, and then quickly swirls them around, dragging the player’s eye after his hands. When he stops, the player points to the shell he is sure it is under but, of course it is not.
In Venice, the men running the game are often Romanian, sometimes Gypsies. Everyone knows the game is a cheat and it is impossible to win, yet people continue to play and continue to lose. Just keep your eye on the shell and win, win, win.
At the moment, or so it seems to me, Italy is being pulled, with or against its will, into a not at all sophisticated version of this game. Keep your eye on the shell: don’t look at the other shells and, for God’s sake, don’t look at the man who is moving them around.
In this case, the bean under the shell is the Emergenza Immigrazione, a full-fledged attempt on the part of the government, with the usual connivance of the media, to persuade the population that danger looms all around them and that there will be no security in the land until something is done about the hordes of illegal immigrants flooding into Italy. Something must be done about those people of darker skin, strange languages, and even stranger religions, who come washing up on the shores of Italy, all apparently bent on stealing jobs, food, and who knows what else from the unsuspecting and hardworking population.
The government is proposing laws that will make it easier to toss immigrants out if they commit serious crimes, to confiscate the houses of landlords who rent to illegal immigrants, and to hand out greater sentences to immigrants who break the law.
Though Kurds and Somalis and Bangladeshis are occasionally named, the menace is generally perceived to come from Romania and from the Nomadi (everyone still calls them Gypsies, of course), whether they come originally from Romania or not. Demonized? Is that the word I am looking for?
Let me return to the image of the shell game. It could be argued that the government’s policies and the way they are publicized is similar to what the guys with the shells do. Look at this and not at that. I’ll cheat and you’ll lose.
The secret of the game is distraction: make the person you want to cheat keep his eye on one thing while you do what you want with the others. And then you win. In this case, people are being made to keep their eye on the illegal immigrants who, in the absence of a sane immigration policy or the capacity and will to enforce it, flood into Italy.
What lies hidden under the other shells is the Mafia in its many branches and manifestations, though, given the enormity and extent of Mafia activity in this country, it would have to be very large shells under which the Mafia could hide.
In the same newscast that discussed the proposed law regarding immigration, mention was made of a report estimating that, last year, the Camorra alone earned 42 billion euros. The report also stated that, in the Mafia feuds of the past decade, almost a thousand people had been murdered, either deliberately or caught in cross fire. Another report estimated that the total earnings for the various mafiosi, last year, was 93 billion euros. Is there a country in Africa that has a GNP of 93 billion euros? Excluding the developed world and those countries that float on seas of oil deposits, where exists a country with a GNP of 93 billion euros?
Recently, on the outskirts of Rome, a woman was murdered in a singularly grisly fashion (is there a nongrisly fashion in which to kill a person?) by a man described in the original reports as a Rom. The government immediately ordered the disbanding and destruction of the Rom encampments on the outskirts of the city, and this was followed by a number of attacks on the Rom camps. The newly elected mayor of Rome is a man of the right, not to call him anything else, and he is vociferous in stating that sicurezza is one of his chief concerns.
During the recent election campaign, the soon-to-be-elected president of the Consiglio dei Ministri referred to a convicted Mafia killer as a “hero.” And one of the first directives of the new government was to address itself to the Emergenza Immigrazione.
During the year it took me to write a book in which the victim was a Gypsy child, I spoke to many people about the Rom. A commissario of police told me that, though the Rom account for a disproportionate percentage of crime in Italy, the crimes they commit are not violent ones. They will rob your house, pick your pocket, steal your car, but they usually will not hurt you. Another policeman said that if you come into your home while a Gypsy is robbing it, he will generally run away. My general perception from speaking to policemen in different police services and cities is that, while they don’t much like the Rom and see them as thieves, they do not perceive them as being a dangerous or violent people. Nor did I perceive any rancorous feeling toward them: that is generally reserved for Albanians and non-Gypsy Romanians.
One estimate I was given of the number of Rom in Italy was 150,000, but since then I’ve read the number 300,000 in the newspapers. Many were born in Italy and thus possess Italian passports; others come in on UN travel documents, having been driven out of the countries where they previously lived. Because it is a mobile population, it is almost impossible to give an accurate number. Many of them do not insert themselves into the social system—the children do not go to school, families have no fixed address—so it is impossible to produce an accurate census of their numbers.
Italians seem to have conflicting opinions of Rom, as they have conflicting opinions of most things. The media reflect this, with cries for stricter penalties for those who break the laws at the same time that one hears and reads the same sort of gooey sentimentality with which Italians insist upon viewing most social problems. Thus, when RAI radio interviews Rom, they interview—at least the time I was listening—an eight-year-old Rom boy who lives in a camp, goes to school every day, and wants to grow up to be a bus driver. He says, of course, that Italians are “brava gente.”
The same pr
ogram presented an interview with an adult Rom, who acknowledged that of course we’ll rob your houses and steal your cars—speaking quite as though he were talking about the daily grind of going down to the office—but we don’t hurt anyone.
At the same time that the media attempt to present a rosy picture of Rom, there is a growing level of violence against them. Their camps are being torched and they are being driven out of various towns and cities. The mayor of Rome has said that the illegal camps must be removed.
One thing that remains is the impulsive, instinctive generosity of the average Italian (if such a creature exists) toward the Rom. A gynecologist I’ve known for years treats them for free and laments the state of her patients, victims of their society and of their men. Beggars on the streets, at least of Venice, prosper. Great effort is made—futile effort, as it turns out—by the various social services to see that the children are sent to school. And families are often provided with free housing by the various cities and towns where they live.
But speak with Italians for any amount of time and an underlying suspicion of and dislike of Rom will often surface, though I am hardened enough to believe that this is true not only in Italy.
Back to the walnut shells. A few years ago, a teacher in the United States was fired for having suggested, apropos of America’s recent adventure in Iraq, that President Bush’s tactics—creating a foreign menace to distract people from the mess at home—were similar to those used by Hitler. But what is better than a foreign menace to distract the population from considering the appalling mess in which their country finds itself? Why consider the fact that the Emergenza Rifiuti in Naples has gone on for fourteen years because the Camorra control the garbage business when you can be alarmed instead by the menace presented by the dark-skinned foreigner? Why bother with something like a mere 93 billion euros when the public can be provoked with the news that these pesky foreigners will steal your chickens? Who else to blame for the crescita zero of your economy?
